O.K., so can we just admit that when it comes to redistricting – the
process by which politicians define the legislative branch of the
federal government – there are few if any limits on partisan power
grabs?

That certainly seems to be the signal from the U.S. Supreme Court,
which has ruled that disgraced former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay
and his henchmen in the Texas legislature were fully within their
rights to radically alter the maps of the state's U.S. House districts
in order to solidify Republican control of the U.S. House of
Representatives.

The redistricting of congressional districts – a process traditionally
carried out once every ten years by state legislators, who are supposed
to use fresh Census data to assure that all of state's districts have
similar populations – is the single most powerful tool by which the
make up of the U.S. House of Representatives is determined. By
gerrymandering districts to give advantages to incumbents from one
party or another, legislators have over the years made most House
elections irrelevant. Even a well-funded challenger with the issues on
his or her side cannot upset an incumbent who has been given a district
with favorable lines. As a result, in any given election year, only a
few dozen of the nation's 435 House districts see competitive contests.

As bad as the circumstance was, in 2003, DeLay made things dramatically
worse. After using his national contacts to raise the money to put
Republicans in charge of the state legislature in 2002, he had his
allies in Austin radically redraw the state's congressional map with
the express purpose of defeating Democratic incumbents and electing
more Republicans.

It worked. Republicans picked up six Texas congressional seats in 2004.

Democrats challenged the redistricting, but the court's ruling has
placed a stamp of approval on DeLay's map – with one minor objection –
and assured that the gains Republican gains engineered by DeLay will be
retained.

• The court has stated that the map DeLay's produced did not represent
an "unconstitutional political gerrymander" of the state's district
lines. Since it would be difficult to imagine a more
politically-motivated map, the court has effectively said that
partisans can draw maps that suit their political purposes without fear
of intervention or objection by the courts. While some analysts
interpret a line from a previous court ruling as suggesting that
critics of a redistricting map could come up with a "reliable standard"
for challenging a map, if such a standard could not be applied to the
DeLay map it is hard to say where it would ever be viable.

• The court has upheld the right of states to change their
congressional district boundaries more frequently than once every ten
years -- following the completion of a U.S. Census. – which is the
traditional standard. What this means is that, when control of a state
legislature shifts, so too could the state's congressional district
lines.

• The court has held that there is "nothing inherently suspect about a
legislature's decision to replace mid-decade a court-ordered plan with
one of its own." Thus, court-ordered plans – which are usually the
fairest to voters, in that they tend to set up more competitive
districts – can be replaced by legislators who don't like them. This is
a hugely significant development, in that it effectively removes the
fall-back position that good government groups have used when
challenging legislative gerrymandering. Foes of a particular map might
get it thrown out by the courts, and they might even get a panel of
judges to draw a new map, but there is no longer any certainty that the
new map will stand.

The court did rule that the lines of one Texas district will need to be
redrawn because DeLay and his minions moved 100,000 Hispanic voters out
of the southwest Texas 23rd District in order to protect a Republican
incumbent, Henry Bonilla, politically. The court determined that move
to undercut the influence of Hispanic voters was a violation of the
Voting Rights Act. But, notably, the four most conservative justices on
the court opposed even that determination.

Anyone who was looking to the Supreme Court to clean up the
redistricting process and to provide for competitive elections is
making a mistake. As Rob Richie, executive director of the Center for
Voting and Democracy says, "If we're really concerned about fair
elections, we have stop counting on the courts and start looking for
political solutions."

In the short-term, Richie says, Congress should set national standards
for redistricting. "Congress could establish standards for transparency
-- sunshine-on-the-process standards that could be defined so that
redistricting can't be done behind closed doors. A second step could be
to set guidelines for when you can and cannot do redistricting. That
would address some of the concerns about the court's ruling."

In the long-term, Richie says that reformers should begin pushing from
a proportional representation system that might see three members of
Congress elected from larger, more competitive districts using an
instant-runoff voting model.

"If you are concerned about what the court ruling has done, there are
immediate steps that can be taken," says Richie. "But what we need to
do is dig in to really reform how elections for Congress are
conducted."